 AINX, as you've probably figured out, has many of the same ground rules as a TEDx would have. That is, we're going to have five speakers. Each of them will take 15 minutes. We're going to be really pretty strict on the timing, so after 15 minutes I'm going to walk up on the stage and as they see my slow motion approach, they will wind it up real fast if they haven't gotten there yet. Also, just in the interest of time, there are descriptions of the presenters and their talks in your book. So I'm just going to be up here giving the name of the talk and the name of the presenters, and then the clock will start and they will leap up. So would you give a huge round of applause in just a moment? I actually know who it is, but I'm going to read it anyway. What is the title? Their talk is Improven Business. Are we lying? So let's give it up for Doug Shaw and John Trevor. So we should have this conversation now among friends before we individually wind up with having this conversation about people with people who have no love for what we do. So we're hoping that this is going to be the start of a bigger conversation that kind of goes on throughout the conference. I'm going to be playing the role of the villain. So let's start with the dark side of yes and. I'm beginning here because I believe that yes and is the intersection of all our different definitions of what AI is. We may differ on how broadly to interpret the yes and the end, but it's kind of the foundation and it's terrible. First of all, the first person to speak gets his or her idea explained. No, let's really be honest. Let's really be honest. The first person to speak gets his idea explored. Let's go through the process. I state an idea. You build on it. I build on that. You build on that. What's happening is we're exploring my idea. We're hearing my idea. You can try to sneak your idea in, but that's cheating and we don't do that. First person to speak wins. That's AI. And who is the first person to speak? Why the alpha male, of course. Two, it ignores time constraints. Look, you and I have got to make a decision about how we're going to sell these coffee makers and the whole team can get together for two hours. If we spend the time to properly explore your idea of the commercial where Adolf Hitler is reaching for a bottle of ketchup. It's empty and he gets his coffee cup. That's going to take some significant fraction of our time and we may not have the time to actually explore the realistic options. In real life, it's not often an infinite playground of possibilities. Sometimes it's a finite ten minute recess between your STEM classes. It can be value expertise. Look, we all have our pet romantic story about the ventriloquist who is the one who figured out the design for the artificial heart. But our real world clients have employees with varying levels of expertise. If we're trying to optimize the nuclear reactor, the opinion of the brochure copy editor is not the same as weight as the opinion of the nuclear engineer. I'm going to give you an example now which encompasses all these three things. Two years ago Pablo Suarez gave us an exercise where a Category 5 cyclone was approaching our villain. Our villain. Our village. I'm the villain. What we had was we dutifully yes-handed each other for five minutes about our partner's suggestion about how to build a basement shelter. And we did and then we happily finished the exercise and he told us that if we were in the basement, we are drowned. Died. Because you don't want to go to the basement when a Category 5 cyclone is approaching your village. We yes-handed ourselves into the grave. Whose best interests are we serving? If you're a doctor, your primary goal is to do what's best for your patients. Now none of us took an oath. Yet we all would like to think we're doing the best thing possible for our attendees. But are we? Sometimes workers should fear change. Embrace change. Deal with change. Don't fear change. I say these words to my business students. We all say those words. But you know what? Our employers, the people who actually write our paychecks, love it when we talk like that. Because then they can fire them and convince them that it was the best thing that ever happened to them. And you don't get the lawsuits and you don't get the lock of morale from all the people who are left behind. Maybe people shouldn't fear change, but we should fear loss. And we talk about not fearing change as a way of avoiding the fact that we have very big things to fear from for loss. Some of our employees really need to fear change and we're telling them not to. Who benefits when intellectually property is value? You know what I tell my students? I work with business students. I say nothing kills creativity as much as being wed to your idea. Right? You say that, right? Ideas belong to all of us. We all work on ideas together. There shouldn't be any ownership, but of course there's ownership. And if nobody's fighting to claim ownership, then the ownership reverts to management. If nobody fights for ownership of an idea, that idea gets owned by the boss. See, we give a false impression of corporate benevolence. Right now studies show that empowered workers are productive workers. Many of us say that and it's true. That's the studies. That's the science. What if the science started to say that the real productive workers are the physically uncomfortable ones? Or even if the science didn't say that, what if that was the belief? We would be out. We'd be gone and they would hire the sadistic carpenters instead. We tell employees they're stakeholders, but as soon as the cost-benefit analysis of that person's existence goes negative, they are out. Hiring us to make workers feel empowered is the means. The end is always the same, ringing the last bit of productivity out of them. And we sell the myth that this is for their own good. Failure can have consequences. I enthusiastically tell my students about the guy who gave the OK for Windows Vista to ship, almost bankrupted Microsoft, and I checked he still is employed. He still is employed. There's no consequences to failure if that guy can still have a job. That's what I say. But of course there's consequences to failure, right? And Paul pretty much summed it up. He saved us 30 seconds of presentation time, which I just used saying that. So failure does have consequences. Of course CEOs want us to tell employees to take risks, the kinds of risks where they get the consequences if they fail and the CEO gets the benefits of success. Are we buying into that myth? When we teach people to take risks and they get the consequences, we have gone to another state. So now I've destroyed every single thing we have worked for and made everything irrelevant unless John can save us. Go ahead and try it. I was going to wear a white cowboy hat for this, but I couldn't find one. So you'll just have to visualize it. So the first thing I want to say is let's be clear, applied improvisation is not improv. Nobody is suggesting we take the behaviors that enable us to create a theater in the moment and transplant it wholesale into the corporate or any other world. That's not what we're saying. So to look at these points one by one, the first person who gets to speak, well, if you're going to use applied improvisation as a facilitation tool, the facilitation part is as important as the applied improv part and probably more so. It's the job of the facilitator to set the rules, set the boundaries, manage the power in the room so that the dominant monkeys don't run everything. So for example, I could set up a system where we each get to say one idea as we go around. We all yes and that idea for 90 seconds and at the end of it we've had 12 ideas that have all been yes and did and nobody's running the show, everyone's been heard. It's still applied improv, but we're improvisation, sorry Paul, but we're managing it. Teaching yes and is just a way of explaining that to people. I maintain that even in a limited time frame a proper yes and is quicker and more efficient way of dealing with what seems like an inappropriate or unhelpful response than the two alternatives, which is to get into an argument about why it isn't a good idea or to just stamp on it and lose a collaborator for the rest of the session. So to use Doug's example, the proper yes and response would be what is it about Hitler and Ketchup that so appeals to you and that would lead to a discussion on some deeper values and no doubt would move us towards our time constrained response quicker, more quickly and more efficiently than arguing or stamping. Next, it devalues expertise. This is missing the heart of yes and. Even on stage, we don't say yes to everything our partner says, what we do is accept and build on the reality that presents itself. So in business what we're trying to do is counteract the traditional or habitual naysaying that squashes ideas before they even get heard. So if somebody in a meeting says, hey, let's give away all our products for free, it doesn't mean we all yell yes and rush down to the warehouse and throw it all. But if we give it a moment to breathe, it could lead to a discussion about lost leaders, about free samples for blog writers who could get our product out there, about discounted products, all sorts of fruitful conversations could be heard. Again, yes and is just a technique for teaching that. Have I done all three? Yes. Who's in best interest? Workers should fear change. News folks, change happens. It's going to happen. So that's not the question. The question is what do you do with it? And what applied improvisation does, so what we're not saying is that we lovingly embrace global warming or oppressive regimes and embrace it because those are the changes that are happening. What it does, what we try and do is equip people to notice and realize the change and see all the tools that are available to them, personal, social, emotional, physical tools that they can then utilize as a response. So we teach games like New Choice so that people can practice that resilience in a safe environment. We're teaching flexibility. We're not teaching mindless acceptance of everything. We're teaching flexibility. Intellectual property. Who owns the name when an improv group splits in two? It's nothing to do with improv applied or otherwise. This is a conversation about intellectual ownership. Many people when they join an organization sign an agreement that says whatever ideas they come up with belong to the organization even if they have them on the beach on holiday. That's just part of the world. These conversations about ownership have to be had but not in the hot house of the training room. Applied improvisation is a very useful creative tool. It's not a solution to intellectual ownership. That's a legal discussion. Oh, false impression. Yeah. So there's no such thing as corporate culture. Sorry. There are corporations that have cultures and they're all different, just like people are different. Some will value their employees. Some only value the bottom line. Some realize that wisely there's a connection between the two things. So I offer two responses to this. You as an applied improviser have your own personal set of ethics and values. If you are uncomfortable about a way a client might use your work, don't do the job. Don't accept it. Walk away. Secondly, we very rarely work with an entire organization. We very rarely have the opportunity to affect the entire culture. What we work with is with individuals and with groups and using applied improvisation we can help them survive and thrive in a positive way no matter what the culture that surrounds them is. So we can still do good even within the dark. Failure can have consequences. You bet. Some failures are massive. It can be really serious. I do quite a lot of work with doctors and I'm really pleased to report that they're mostly very risk averse. I want them to be risk averse especially if it's my doctor. The trouble is that risk averseness can spill over into other things. Does it help a doctor to be habitually risk averse if they're thinking about expanding their business or asking somebody out on a date? Not necessarily. What we're doing is giving the people an opportunity to practice risk in a safe environment. And as a bonus we help them learn what to do with failure. The celebrate failure that so upsets our outgoing president is really not a celebration of failure. It's a lesson in how to deal with failure without the crippling effects of shame that stop us moving forward and rebounding. What we do is offer the people a chance to practice those failures in a safe environment. It's not a substitute for risk assessments. It really isn't. That's it. Those are my responses. Doug and I felt we just wanted to start a conversation that hopefully we can all have so that when you're confronted by people who ask these questions we're more equipped to respond to them.